A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

of the world’, Emperor Frederick II, had spent his childhood and youth in Sicily acquiring his taste
for learning and freethinking in that island where Arabs and Christians had lived in harmony for
two centuries. This is why he was not unduly perturbed when the pope excommunicated him; he
was relatively certain that the Church is not essential to salvation - for if it is, then all those highly
intelligent Muslims are damned, and that cannot be true.
And now we can begin to see what an extraordinary cataclysm was about to occur. Scepticism like
Frederick’s was as far as it could be from the total belief of the popes. Absurd as it sounds,
Frederick’s guardian during his early years had been Pope Innocent III, one of the most fanatical of
the crusading popes. He believed in his spiritual mission with a grim, humourless intensity, and
took it for granted that one of his major tasks was to crush all unbelievers. He reserved his deepest
loathing for a sect called the Cathars - one of those ‘purist’ reform movements that had sprung up
in opposition to the obvious corruption of the Church. Cathars were not unlike the Quakers of a
later century; their observances were simple, their lives rather ascetic. Like the Persian prophet
Mani, they believed that everything to do with the spirit is good and everything to do with the
world is evil. In which case, of course, God could never have created the world; it must be a
creation of the Evil One. Jesus could not have had a physical body, and the crucifixion must have
been some kind of mirage. These doctrinal differences, which strike us as harmless enough - there
are a dozen modern Christian sects with far stranger views - seemed to Innocent III a guarantee of
damnation. Toulouse was the centre of this heresy, and the pope excommunicated its ruler, Count
Raymond. He sent inquisitors to sniff out heresy, and one of Count Raymond’s men assassinated
the papal legate (or ambassador). For two days, the pope was so angry that he could not speak (a
sure sign of a Right Man). When he recovered his voice, he shouted for a crusade against the
heretics. This was unheard of - a crusade against Christians. The king of France refused to have
anything to do with it. But dozens of knights thought it would make excellent sport - especially as it
was only to last forty days. They besieged the town of Beziers and massacred its twenty thousand
inhabitants, although many were not Cathars. Town after town was reduced in the same way -
including Toulouse itself. The ‘crusade’ dragged on for decades, and ended with the siege of the
fortress of Montsegur in 1243 and the burning alive of two hundred people who refused to
renounce their faith. The Church stamped out Catharism as the Nazis tried to stamp out the Jews -
by mass extermination.
So it is one of the ironies of history that Innocent III should have been the guardian of the young
Frederick, and no doubt direct contact with that dogmatic and narrow-minded old man convinced
Frederick that the Church could not possibly be the only repository of truth. Frederick was the first
sign of a new intellectual attitude; he was, in fact, the first of the ‘Renaissance men’. His attitudes
and those of the pope were as far apart as fire and ice. Sooner or later, there was bound to be an
enormous explosion. It is satisfactory to record that when Frederick came to power he flatly
declined to burn heretics, or even to allow priests freedom from taxation and from the jurisdiction
of civil courts.
This particular battle ended, of course, with the death of Innocent in 1216, but continued a decade
later with equally violent clashes between Frederick and Gregory IX then with his successor
Innocent IV. But the real struggle was between two different currents of human evolution: religious
authoritarianism and scientific enquiry. There can be no doubt that the great religions - Buddhism,
Christianity, Islam - had taken mankind an immense step beyond the kind of mindless materialism
that had been the downfall of Rome. But all religions begin like a mountain stream, and slowly turn
into a rather muddy river. The ‘crusade’ against the Cathars was a sign of how far Christianity had